city2surf 2018 wrap up

city2surf 2018 was yesterday, so how did the race go? First off, thanks to everyone who helped out with my fund raising for the Black Dog Institute — you raised nearly $2,000 AUD for this important charity, which is very impressive. Thanks for everyone’s support!

city2surf is 14kms, with 166 meters of vertical elevation gain. For the second year running I was in the green start group, which is for people who have previously finished the event in less than 90 minutes. There is one start group before this, red, which is for people who can finish in less than 70 minutes. In reality I think its unlikely that I’ll ever make it to red — it would require me to shave about 30 seconds per kilometre off my time to just scrape in, and I think that would be hard to do.

Training for city2surf last year I tore my right achilles, so I was pretty much starting from scratch for this years event — at the start of the year I could run about 50 meters before I had issues. Luckily I was referred to an excellent physiotherapist who has helped me build back up safely — I highly recommend Cameron at Southside Physio Therapy if you live in Canberra.

Overall I ran a lot in training for this year — a total of 540 kilometres. I was also a lot more consistent than in previous years, which is something I’m pretty proud of given how cold winters are in Canberra. Cold weather, short days, and getting sick seem to always get in the way of winter training for me.

On the day I was worried about being cold while running, but that wasn’t an issue. It was about 10 degrees when we started and maybe a couple of degrees warmer than that at the end. The maximum for the day was only 16, which is cold for Sydney at this time of year. There was a tiny bit of spitting rain, but nothing serious. Wind was the real issue — it was very windy at the finish, and I think if it had been like that for the entire race it would have been much less fun.

That said, I finished in 76:32, which is about three minutes faster than last year and a personal best. Overall, an excellent experience and I’ll be back again.